Trump Voter Enthusiasm, Registration Beating Democrats in Key States

You need only look at the thousands of excited attendees at any given Donald Trump event, versus the several hundred at Clinton rallies, to see who has the most enthusiasm behind them this election year.

However dire the media makes out Trump’s chances of winning over Clinton to be, his fans don’t seem phased by it, and here’s a bit of good news showing how their enthusiasm is translating into real numbers.

According to a report by Politico today, one pollster says: “The voter registration data I’m seeing does not support the idea of a surge in Democratic voter enthusiasm.”

Voter registration has been down across the board for Democrats this year, and on top of that many tens of thousands had switched to the Republican party in order to vote in the primaries.

Here are the highlights from today’s report in Politico, which filters out their usual negative spin on anything that looks to be beneficial to Donald Trump:

In Pennsylvania — where Democrats’ registration advantage has fallen by a fifth since the 2012 election, to 915,000 voters — more than 85,000 former Democrats have become Republicans this year, almost three times the number of voters who made the opposite switch.

In North Carolina, Democrats’ voter registration advantage shrunk by 44,000 between June 2015 and May 2016, more than twice the rate it fell at during that period last cycle. As of Aug. 13, the Democratic advantage had dwindled to 641,000.

More concerning for Democrats should be Florida, where the party’s registration advantage has shrunk to 259,000 voters — less than half the party’s edge during the 2012 election.

So far this year, Florida Republicans have added close to 70,000 more voters to their rolls than Democrats have. “That [change], especially when you’re talking about a state that Obama carried by less than 100,000 votes last time, could be significant,” said Couvillon, the Louisiana pollster.

The strength of Trump’s ground operation in the primaries varied wildly from state to state, but in Florida, under the direction of former Rick Scott aide Karen Giorno, his campaign has taken credit for registering 35,000 new Republicans and bringing 5,000 independents and Democrats into the party.

In Iowa — a swing state where Democrats lost their entire 100,000-active-voter edge between the 2008 and 2012 elections and have seen their position continue to erode more slowly this cycle — Joe Henry of the League of United Latin American Citizens said Trump has made his work registering Hispanic voters much easier. “We’ve probably had a 20 percent increase just because of concerns about the hate,” he said.